Page 23

II

It’s only a few blocks.

That’s what Alice thinks she says, along with, I can make it, but honestly, the words might have gotten stuck inside her head because he’s still there, at her side, and they’re going through one of the gates but when she turns to see which one, she stumbles, and he steadies her.

“Whoa there,” he says, a laugh catching in his throat, but she doesn’t know what’s funny. Her stomach clenches, and she wants to lie down, clings to the thought of her room, her bed, and does he know she lives at Matthews? Did she tell him? Is that where they are going now?

He makes small talk, and she doesn’t, jaw locked tight against the urge to hurl again.

He compliments her accent, and she mumbles that his is nice as well, and he crinkles his nose and says he doesn’t have one and she doesn’t know if she’s supposed to laugh or not, and honestly, it is taking all her focus just to stay on her feet, to hear his voice past the dull throbbing in her head.

She should have stayed in bed, she thinks.

She stumbles again, and again he’s there.

“I’m okay,” she murmurs, even though she’s not.

Something is really wrong, and she tries to disentangle herself as she says it, gently, so he doesn’t think she’s being rude, but he pulls her closer, his arm now around her waist, and she thinks of telling him that she’s gay, but this isn’t the time or the place and after all, he’s just helping her get home, so there’s no reason to bring it up, to make things weird, not when he’s just being nice.

But the closeness of him tickles something in Alice’s throat, and the pounding in her head gets louder, and finally she stops, bracing herself against a cold brick wall, afraid that if she takes another step her legs will buckle, or she’ll faint.

(She’d only fainted once in her whole life, when she was six, and Dad took her and Catty on holiday to southern Spain, and she didn’t know the sun there was strong enough to make you sick, just from lying in it.)

Alice stumbles again, her body and her mind both lurching back as Colin’s grip tightens on her, like he’s the only thing holding her up.

“Hey,” he says, “I’ve got you,” and his tone is still steady, still undeniably nice, but the air tastes wrong, rancid, a sour odor that must be coming off the bins behind the dorm.

When did they end up on the wrong side of the entrance?

Alice twists, trying to see where she is, and the night tips with the motion.

“I don’t feel well,” she says, aloud, trying to pull free. “I need to go lie down.”

“Sure thing,” he says. “Of course,” he says, but he is still standing between her and the world, and then she feels the scratch of a tree trunk at her back, and the weight of him against her, and for a second she thinks he’s trying to hold her up instead of back, instead of down, but then his hands are groping at her shirt, and his mouth is mashing against hers, and she bites down, feels flesh break between her teeth.

He wrenches back, blood welling on his bottom lip, and on her tongue, and just like that—

The night tears open—

Splits right in two—

Like an old movie, the kind on film, a tear in the reel—

The image on the screen goes black—

And when it flickers back, the tree is gone, Colin is gone, and Alice is standing in a shower stall, fully dressed and soaking wet, cold water sluicing through her clothes and pink ribbons circling the drain around her shoes. Iron in her mouth, the taste of pennies on her tongue.

Blood, she thinks, and at the same time, she knows it isn’t hers.

(How can she know that?)

Presses her palms against her eyes, trying to force the moments back like camera flashes. But all she sees is red. Another stretch of missing time.

Alice peels away the clothes, leaves them piled like a soggy shadow in the corner of the shower stall, salvages the last dregs of soap from an abandoned bottle and scrubs herself pink, then red, then raw.

And as she does, she notices how much better she is feeling. Her teeth still ache, in that dull sinus way, but her head no longer hurts, and she’s stopped shivering, despite the water running cold.

She snaps the shower off, realizes she doesn’t exactly have a change of clothes, but someone has left a towel to dry outside a nearby stall, so she swipes it, pulls it tight around her as she pads to the sinks, and studies her reflection in the glass above, expecting to see the violence—his, or hers? —written in the hollows of her face.

But Alice looks fine.

Which is wrong, isn’t it?

Because she shouldn’t, not after what’s just happened.

She shouldn’t look fine, shouldn’t feel fine.

She should be freaking out, but she’s not, and she knows it’s probably shock, but shock eventually passes and she doesn’t want this to—doesn’t know if she can handle panic on top of everything else—and then, as if she’s gone and cracked the seal, it all comes crashing over her.

Her throat tightens and her reflection blurs, tears welling up, and the weird thing is, for a moment, the whole bathroom looks like it’s been tinted red, and then the tears slide down her face and Alice yelps, hands going to her mouth.

Because she’s crying blood.

Two red lines running down her cheeks, like something out of a horror film. She swipes at her face with the hem of the stolen towel before realizing her mistake, the red leaching right into the pale cotton, the metal scent making her stomach twist again as a jagged memory comes rushing up, and—

—they’re on the ground—

—the two of them—

—and he’s the one begging her to stop—

—and then his throat is open—

—the crimson sweater matted dark and—

—and then it’s just Alice, in the bathroom, wet hair sticking to her skin.

She scrapes it back, turns on the tap and splashes palmfuls of cold water on her face until the crying stops, watches the pink water swirl in the drain, then forces her gaze back up to her reflection.

It stares back, startled, but unhurt, so she leans closer, till the tip of her nose touches the mirror, close enough for her breath to fog the glass.

But it doesn’t.

And that is how Alice learns she isn’t breathing.

She reels back from the mirror, as if she’s seen a ghost. Her hands go to her mouth, a preemptive gesture, in case there is a scream, but nothing comes out.

She takes in a massive gulp, sucking the air in and then out, as if to prove she can, but it feels forced, so instead she tries holding her breath, which she’s never been good at.

The panic always kicks in before the need for air, but she still tries, counts to thirty, then sixty, then ninety, even though she’s never been able to hold her breath for more than forty-five.

Alice waits for her lungs to twinge, her head to spin, her heart to start pounding in her ears, but the only sound she hears isn’t a sound at all, but a kind of white noise in her skull, no pounding heart, no bodily reaction to the lack of air, or the panic now ringing through her bones, and she’s lost count of how long it’s been since she started holding her breath, and when she goes looking for her pulse, she can’t find it.

There’s a heavy nothing behind her ribs, a stillness so dense there’s only one word for it.

Dead.

Dead weight, dead air, dead space.

Which is ridiculous, of course, right, because Alice isn’t dead —she’s standing right there in front of the mirror, but all that does is put an “un” before the word, which is somehow even worse, so she decides that this is something else, something making her sick, delirious, even. That’s it.

Alice isn’t dead.

She is just having a very bad night.

That is what she tells herself as she makes her way out of the bathroom, and down the hall, and back into the shared suite, where Rachel is still sitting cross-legged on the couch, laptop balanced on her knees.

If Rachel looked up right then, she’d see Alice, wide-eyed and terrified and wrapped in someone else’s towel, the cotton spotted red, but she doesn’t, just keeps typing, as she asks Alice if she’s feeling better and Alice says Sure, or Yeah, or Heading to bed.

It doesn’t matter, so long as it’s not the awful laugh that’s clawing up her throat.

She escapes into her room, grateful Lizbeth fled to Jeremy’s, and closes the door behind her.

She locks it, then sheds the towel, and stands before the full-length mirror mounted to the closet, wearing nothing but the thin gold chain around her neck, the one she always wears, the pendant swinging at the end, her little piece of home.

Alice stands there, naked, and alone, fights the urge to hide behind her folded arms, because she’s never been good with this kind of up-close scrutiny—look for any length of time and the picture unravels into problem areas, knobby elbows and awkward knees, a litany of imperfections—but now, she studies herself with the cold remove of a crime scene, searching for clues in place of memories.

A mark, a bite, some evidence of an infection.

Yes, that is a good word, infection, a logical, medical word.

Like cause and effect—if p then q —one thing leading to another, because something led to this.

She’s on a road, and she just has to turn around and walk back the way she came until she finds the intersection, the moment that led here, to her, to this.

Alice thinks about last night, about waking up this morning. She remembers the lipstick stains, like bruises, grazing her wrist, her ribs, her throat, but she’s scrubbed them away, and now there is nothing but cold, pale skin.

She has scars, of course, but they are all familiar, ordinary marks. A silver dash on her left knee, from racing Catty along the top of the stone wall. A pale hook on her forearm, from a tumble in the glass-strewn lot behind the pub.

Nothing else.

Which should be a relief, but it’s not because the fact is, Alice still can’t find her pulse, not at her wrist, or her throat, the veins too still beneath her skin.

She goes to her toiletry kit and finds a razor, thumbs the edge and watches as the flesh parts neatly, a single too-dark bead of blood welling sluggishly up onto her skin.

It doesn’t hurt, but she flinches at the sight, sticks her thumb into her mouth on instinct, and feels her stomach vise, her teeth clamp shut, so sudden and so sharp she gasps, wrenches her hand free, and sees a deep gouge in the meat of her thumb where she’s bitten down.

Alice stares in fascinated horror at the depth of the puncture, and then, right before her eyes, the wound begins to close, like a movie in reverse, skin knitting neatly back together.

She glances up at the mirror as if looking for a witness, locks eyes with herself just in time to see the tips of two white teeth retreating behind her upper lip.

Her reflection stares back at her, surprised.

“Oh,” she says aloud to no one. “ Fuck. ”

She backs away from the mirror, almost laughs.

Because it’s ridiculous.

First the thing with the breathing, and the pulse, and now this. Like some bad dream, only she’s pretty sure she’s awake.

But here’s the thing. Alice is no fool. She was raised on good books and bad TV, and she knows what this looks like, but she also knows that it’s not real.

It’s not real, and yet she is, and she’s not sure how to square the two, and there is a word she will not use.

Not because it doesn’t fit, but because it feels absurd even to think it, just the shape of it in her mouth makes a nervous sound rise like trapped air in her chest—the place where her heart isn’t beating—and as long as she doesn’t use the word—doesn’t even think it—then she can still be sane, and this can still be salvaged.

Alice Moore has always been smart, top marks in maths and physics, both, and this seems like a logic problem, right, so here is what she knows:

She went to a party.

She came home with a girl.

She went to bed well.

And woke up sick.

(Not dead.)

(Because that can’t be fixed, and this can.)

This is a problem she just has to solve.

She went to a party.

She came home with a girl.

She turns and plucks the purple Post-it off her bedside lamp.

Goodbye, Alice.

xo Lottie

Alice drags her laptop into the bed. When it comes to life, she winces at the brightness, turns the screen as dark as it will go, then pulls up the school directory and begins to search.